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Thursday, June 15, 2017

Alternative Swear Words

I have to start
by confessing a particularly bad habit of mine… I swear like a sailor.
Actually, to be more accurate, I swear like a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s bad,
and I promise I’m working on it. In my defense, certain words communicate the
emotion better than the watered-down versions. And certain words just feel so
good on the tongue.

With that in
mind, you’d think writing a character who is deliberate about using alternative
swear words would be difficult for me. In The
Wrong Kind of Compatible, Cassie swears a lot (like me), but she
substitutes alternative swear words. Not because she minds the swear words. Her
reasons have more do with a little competition with her brothers (who have
kids) to see who can be the most creative with the alternatives.

As a mama who
struggles to tame this tendency around her kids, I love the idea of a character
who tempers her habit for her nieces and nephews. However, I didn’t want Cassie
to sound too prim or too “perfect mommy,” and so I had a goal with the
alternatives.

Goal: funny but
not too cutsie (which is a tricky balance to strike).

The other tricky
part is coming up with word combinations which are obviously being used as
swear words. There were a few combos I tried which, in context, I think would
throw readers because it'll take a minute to figure out that it's a curse.

I thought you
might get a kick out of some of the ones I came up with.

·Cheese and krakens (couldn't help myself. the
geek in me rejoiced at this one.)

·Goodnight nurse

·Fish in a barrel

·Fiddlesticks

·Shut the truck up

·Sure as shootin'

·Honest to gravy

·Bananas

·Son of a nutcracker

·Mother trucker

·What the fedora

·Gorgonzola on a stick

·Cracker jacks

·Heavens to megatron (this was mergatroid, but
the geek in me had to change it)

·Bull honkey

·Work her corn nuts off

·Farfegnugen

·Dang rabbit

·Fraggle rock

I mean, can you
read those, or picture using them, without giggling? I can’t, which made them a
lot of fun to write. I didn’t get to incorporate all of them, but I certainly
tried.

How about you? Do
you have any entertaining swear word alternatives?

The Wrong Kind of
Compatible

Data analyst Cassie Howard may be brilliant (and, okay, a
little awkward), but she’s worked hard to get where she is. She definitely
doesn’t need some sexy new analyst coming in and taking credit for her work. Or
the inappropriate thoughts that keep popping out of her mouth she’d rather he
not hear.

For undercover FBI agent Drew Kerrigan, computers have
always made more sense than people, but he’d better develop some slick social
skills in a hurry if he’s going to win over the too-tantalizing-for-his-sanity
Cassie. Hacking their systems was easy. Now he’s just got to hack the one
person in the company most likely to see through his ruse…

Award-winning contemporary romance author, Kadie Scott, grew
up consuming books and exploring the world through her writing. She attempted
to find a practical career related to her favorite pastime by earning a degree
in English Rhetoric (Technical Writing). However, she swiftly discovered that
writing without imagination is not nearly as fun as writing with it.

No matter the genre, she loves to write witty, feisty
heroines, sexy heroes who deserve them, and a cast of lovable characters to
surround them (and maybe get their own stories). She currently resides in
Austin, Texas, with her own personal hero, her husband, and their two children,
who are growing up way too fast.

7 comments:

Congrats on the new release! Some of those alternatives are really funny :) As for me, I don't swear, that's why I have a hard time with characters that do, especially heroines. It's just a pet peeve of mine and one of the main reasons I have abandoned so many books.

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